Many young adults have felt the impact of the recession and sluggish recovery in tangible ways. Fully half (49%) of those ages 18 to 34 say that because of economic conditions over the past few years, they have taken a job they didn’t really want just to pay the bills. More than a third (35%) say they have gone back to school because of the bad economy. And one-in-four (24%) say they have taken an unpaid job to gain work experience.

First, this study is great evidence of my "what is normal" fail. There is no baseline. OK, 24% moved back in with their parents. How many did this in good times? How much worse is this?

But the real eye-catcher to me is that somehow I am supposed to be shocked that people have to find a job to pay the bills. Even a job that, gasp, they really didn't want. I have a clue for you. A lot of jobs 22-year-olds have to take are not that compelling. Mine were not. Despite what colleges seem to be telling them, the world does not offer up a lot of really cool jobs to inexperienced young adults. Long before you are closing deals with CEO's, you are probably writing sales literature in some cubicle.

And by the way, I am struck by how wealthy our society is when I look at this chart. Look at answers two and three. In both cases, people are saying that in tough times, they chose to forego income and build their skills, even perhaps paying for the privilege. What other time in history would people have this luxury? How many countries today would have so many people with this luxury in hard times? Even in the Great Depression in this country I don't think we saw the same phenomenon. Obviously the economy sucks and it would be great for everyone for it to improve, but in most other times and even in many other countries in the world today, a significant bar in bad times would have been "I starved to death."

Of course, the whole story fell apart when Wagner had to introduce this fact.

While smugglers have become more aggressive in their encounters with authorities, as evidenced by the shooting of a Pinal County deputy on Friday, allegedly by illegal-immigrant drug runners, they do not routinely target residents of border towns.

Sure, that's the ticket, violence hasn't increased in actual border towns...of course, roving drug smugglers just used an AK 47 to gun down a deputy in PINAL County a hundred miles north of the border. But other than that...and the rancher they killed last month...the border towns themselves are pretty calm.

Excuse me, but has anyone on any side of the immigration debate ever claimed that immigrants have never committed a crime? Forget for a minute that the guilty parties in these two cases are mere supposition without any charges filed yet -- particularly the case of the rancher last month. In 2008 there were about 407 killings in the state. So, like, one a month were maybe by immigrant gangs and this is a crisis?

From the link above, I looked up AZ and US crime states in 2000, 2005, and 2008. I was too lazy to do every year and 2009 state stats don't appear to be online yet. Here is the crisis in Arizona in violent crime rates:

Oh Noz, we seem not only to have drastically reduced our violent crime rate right in the teeth of this immigrant "invasion" but we also have reduced it below the US average. This actually understates the achievement, since Arizona is more highly urbanized than the average state (yeah, I know this is counter-intuitive, but it was true even 20 years ago and is more true today). Urban areas have higher crime rates than rural areas, particularly in property crime as below:

So our property crime rate is high, but not totally out of line from other highly urban areas. But the real key here is that during this supposed immigrant invasion, again Arizona has improved faster than the national average. This is seen more clearly when we index both lines to 2000.

One may wonder why climate change alarmists only wave around anecdotes rather than averages. If we really are seeing more drought or floods, show us the averages. The problem is that their story can't be seen in the averages, so they are forced to rely on anecdotes to inflame the population. The same appears to be true of our Arizona immigration panic.